Sabine Hossenfelder

Tell a story. That’s the number one advice from and to science communicators, throughout centuries and all over the globe

I will be away next week, giving three talks at Brookhaven National Lab on Tuesday, April 9 , and one at Yale April 10 Next upcoming lectures are Stuttgart on April 29 (in Deutsch), Barcelona on May 23, Mainz on June 11, (probably) Groningen on June 22, and Hamburg on July 5th. I may or may not attend this year’s Lindau Nobel Laureate meeting, and have a hard time making up my mind about whether or not to go to SciFoo, because, considering the status of my joints, it’s a choice between physical and financial pain, and frankly I’d rather chose neither. I have no idea what Google is doing, but the “Unknown” comments are today what anonymous comments were a decade ago.

Here is what I wrote a year ago And still in December I wrote Before I tell you why I changed my mind, I want to tell you what’s great about high energy particle physics, why I worked in that field for some while, and why, until recently I was in favor of building that larger collider. You can use high precision instead of high energy because, according to the current theories, everything that happens at high energies also influences what happens at low energies. So, now that I have covered why particle colliders are a good way to probe short distances, let me explain why I am not in favor of building a larger one right now. It’s simply because we currently have no reason to think there is anything new to discover at the next shorter distances, not until we get to energies a billion times higher than what even the next larger collider would reach.

If you use each surface pixel and each volume pixel to encode one bit of information, then you can use the surface elements to represent everything that happens in the volume. This idea, which originates in the physics of black holes, requires that everything which can happen inside a volume of space is inscribed on the surface of that volume. The major problem with Hogan’s idea, as I explained back then , was that his calculation did not respect the most important symmetry of Special Relativity, the so-called Lorentz-symmetry. Verlinde and Zurek circumvent this problem by speaking not about a volume of space and its surface, but about a volume of space-time (a “causal diamond”) and its surface.